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Is Word's Grammar Checker Broken?

(E-WRITE)I'd just drafted a rather terse "when am I gonna get paid?" e-mail to a client who owed me money. I was all ready to hit Send when I reminded myself, "Always run a spelling and grammar check," even if you're writing in a state of righteous (unpaid) indignation.

So I ran Word's spelling and grammar checker, and here's the confused mess of feedback I got in return:

Both of Word's helpful suggestions were wrong:

Please let me know if you'd like me to submit these invoice...
Please let me know if you'd like me to submit this invoices...

What was going on? The Microsoft Office Word Help article on the grammar checker explained:

The grammar checker is a "natural language" grammar checker that flags possible problems by performing a comprehensive analysis of the text. The grammar checker may not look for all types of problems; it's designed to focus on those that are most typical or frequent.

So, maybe choosing a pronoun (this, these) that agrees in number with the noun it modifies (invoice, invoices) was just too exotic for Word's grammar checker? I pity anyone who actually needs the grammar help this tool should offer, including the multilingual people I teach in my Business Writing Workshop for ESL Professionals.

Has Word's grammar checker ever steered you wrong? If so, let me know. It'll be fun to gang up on this unreliable tool!

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Marilynne Rudick and Leslie O'Flahavan are partners in E-WRITE, a training and consulting company that specializes in writing for online readers. Rudick and O'Flahavan are authors of Clear, Correct, Concise E-Mail: A Writing Workbook for Customer Service Agents

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